ABSTRACT
Environmental events directly and automatically activate three interactive but distinct psychological systems, responsible, respectively, for perceptual, evaluative, and motivational analysis according to a model proposed by Bargh (1997). These systems’ automatic reactions to environmental events influence perceptual interpretations of other people’s behavior, they color the evaluations of perceived objects and persons, and they inhibit or energize behavioral responses. Automaticity of a social phenomenon is a powerful finding because it implies that a person is not in conscious control of the behavior or perception in question, cannot escape the automatic processing once it is elicited by appropriate trigger stimuli, and ultimately cannot be held fully responsible for the ensuing biases in perceptions, judgments, and behavior (Bargh, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
